‘The most expensive photos ever taken’: the space shots that changed humanity’s view of itself

Taken at 28,000kmh and costing billions of dollars, the first ever photos taken by astronauts are on show at Paris Photo. For Nasa print dealer Daniel Blau, they are proof that nothing is impossible when nations collaborate

It was one of history’s monumental moments – but if John Glenn hadn’t popped into the supermarket to pick up a Contax camera and a roll of 35mm film on his way to board the Friendship 7, there may have been no visual document of it. The photographs the American astronaut took from the window of his capsule as he orbited Earth on 20 February 1962 gave an unprecedented testimony of the Mercury Project’s first orbital mission. The Soviet Union might have beaten the Americans in the race to human spaceflight – but the Americans had now shot the first galactic colour photographs.

The pictures are also, German gallerist Daniel Blau points out, “the most expensive photographs ever taken. Billions of dollars were spent to get them.” Blau exhibited an original print of Glenn’s first picture taken in space at this year’s Paris Photo, alongside a cache of rare Nasa photographic prints – many of them never publicly seen before, most of them by unknown scientists and astronauts.